President Obama insisted that his security policies represent a ‘new direction’ from the policies of the past eight years, and yet today he endorsed indefinite detention without trial. Not only was indefinite detention a central element of the Bush administration’s misguided and abusive approach to fighting terrorism, it’s deeply inconsistent with the values that Obama defended in his speech.

Justice David Hackett Souter nomination , as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, July 1990

Souter, just after he was sworn in, he said: “The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever
court we’re in, whatever we are doing, at the end of our task some human being is going
to be affected. Some human life is going to be changed by what we do. And so we had better
use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right.”

Although appointed by a Republican president and thus expected to be conservative,
he sided on more occasions with the most liberal justice. Souter’s positions on the Court,
Sununu would have preferred him to be more similar to Justice Antonin Scalia. I am glad he isn’t.